Andy Samberg on ‘7 Days in Hell,’ Mockumentaries and Threeways

Speaking of which, I’d heard you cast Kit Harington by Googling his name?
Very close: We Googled “young British actors between the ages of 25 to 35,” and when he is name came up, we thought, Oh, he’d be perfect. We knew we wanted the other player to be British, because Murray had sort of envisioned his character, Charles Poole as being this Andy Murray-type player — someone who had the pressure of winning Wimbledon for England. I’m a huge Game of Thrones fan, however, and the mere idea of “We could get Jon Snow to be in this!” was, of course, incredibly appealing to me. And I think he was happy not to be shooting some place that wasn’t 20 degrees below zero, but not so psyched about the extreme heat; he kept joking about his inability to pick projects that require nice weather. But I think this was less grueling for him than Thrones — all he has to do is say “indubitably” a lot and endure sexual advances from Michael Sheen.

Is there a secret to doing a good parody?
You have to know your subject. That’s always been our standard with the Lonely Island stuff, to be honest; we really don’t take on a genre that we don’t love or have a somewhat deep knowledge of. And with Murray and me, we both genuine tennis fans and were more than happy to do a lot of deep research, so that helped. There are jokes here that are pulled from a lot of different players over the years and from a lot of different eras, which was part of the fun. Nobody has really done a huge tennis comedy, surprisingly, so there was a lot of ground to cover.

The “love” aspect, if you’ll pardon the pun, is a huge part of any parody, you’d think. If you’ve never heard a Nineties R&B song, a song about putting your dick in a box would still be funny. But if you know the genre…
[Laughs]…then it’s a lot funnier, right. When we first did “Dick in a Box,” everyone said oh, you guys are supposed to be Color Me Badd, because Justin [Timberlake] and I are white. But really, we were drawing a lot more from R. Kelly and H-Town, because that was what we had been listening to. The detail work of it, getting as close to possible to the real thing, is what we’re most proud of.

Aaron Williams is a great player in the same way that Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s Jake Peralta is a great cop — you seem to have cornered the market on people who are great at one thing and suck at everything else.
Yeah, although they are different. Jake is highly intelligent in one specific way — being a detective — whereas Aaron is a borderline psychopath and a lunatic who happens to be good at tennis [laughs]. But yeah, I find characters who operate on blind ego really funny. You know, the kind of people who are blessed with one talent and then are able to get away with a lot because of that. It’s a very Sweet and Lowdown kind of situation. [Pause] Not that we are nearly as high art as Woody Allen here.

You’re within spitting distance of Woody Allen with this.
We are within vomiting distance, maybe.